My mother must have been inspired more than a bit by Ranch Romances, Thrilling Ranch Stories, and Rodeo Romances, pulp fiction magazines that began publication in 1924 and ran through 1971. According to Chelsea Anderson, “Ranch Romances was only one of more than 180 western pulp magazines created between 1920 and 1950 , and only a small part of the nearly 10,000 issues published in the entire Western genre.” In 1945 at age twenty, my mother had seen thousands of pages of magazine art and plenty of examples of pinup art that captured an immense audience in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Although she appreciated western images the most, she still could see a little of herself in Ava Gardner and other iconic beauties of the day. Below is my mother opposite Ava Gardner on the beach.

Ava Gardner’s pinup pose competed with Coca Cola ads and western romance magazines as inspirational models. Of course, Outlaw, starring Jane Russell, hit the movie screens in 1943, my mother’s senior year in high school. At the time, Russell gave everyone a new perspective on the cowgirl look.

The March 6, 1954 Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell, “The Girl in the Mirror” sent my mother looking through her photo album collection for a picture of herself taken in 1938. The Post’s cover painting depicted Mary Whalen Leonard, Rockwell’s favorite model, contemplating a photo of Jane Russell. According to a 2013 Saturday Evening Postarticle, Rockwell said, “I should not have added the photograph of the movie star,…the little girl is not wondering if she looks like the star but just trying to estimate her own charms.” Even though my mother was posing for the camera instead of contemplating her self-image in comparison to a magazine photo, the Rockwell painting and her own photograph connection clicked for her.

If my brother joined me, we took turns playing a game of who could find a cloud formation that captured a person or a object on which we could agree. Abraham Lincoln appeared more often than any other person, although Santa Claus was a close second. Rabbits, cattle, and hippos wandered or ran through the clouds with a degree of regularity. In one instant, Smokey could not see my Statue of Liberty, and I could not see his locomotive, but we agreed that Bugs Bunny sat on a rock eating a carrot. If the horizon was filled with clouds, our imaginations could find substantial forms in seconds. On the rare evenings when our mother sat with us, we had to explain in detail which part of which cloud structure depicted what we saw, and, then, she would hesitantly agree. She contended she could see pictures or representations in the clouds as quickly as we did when she was young.

“My mind doesn’t work that way any more,” she complained.

“Why,” I questioned.

“I have so much to do that I don’t take the time to relax and smell the roses.”

“What roses?”

She gently laughed and explained, “That’s just an expression that means I’m caught up in washing clothes, fixing lunches, cleaning the house, and getting ready for work to such an extent that I’m not enjoying simple moments like this.”

I am not a synesthete, a person who was born with a perceptual phenomenon in which the stimulation of a sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an automatic experience of a second sensation. I don’t see colors with letters or words, taste an emotion, or get an uncomfortable tactile response to hearing fingernails on a […]

After seeing two different magnificent Red-tailed Hawks on golf courses last week being attacked by mockingbirds and crows, I was reminded of one of those spectacular moments in nature I have seen periodically throughout my life. When I was twelve, my father, offered such a good deal that he could not pass on the opportunity, […]

A NPR Morning Edition news report last September by Jessica Meszaro, “Meat Industry Turns Florida’s Feral Hogs Into Prime Pork,” reminded me of my encounters with wild pigs on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County in the 1950’s, particularly shortly after my family moved onto the ranch in 1957. My father quit his ranch […]

Vick Blackstone would have loved participating in the Great Florida Cattle Drives. Unfortunately, he passed away in 1987, eight years before the first of the three reenactments of Floridian cattle drives that the Florida Cow Culture Preservation Committee under the auspices of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Florida Agricultural Museum […]

Even before the Manatee County school bus slowed to a stop in front of the dirt road leading over the railroad rail cattleguard at the entrance to the Quarter Circle A ranch on State Road 62, my brother, Smokey, and I looked out the opened windows and scanned the small four-acre pasture in front of the […]

One evening on a recent trip to the north Georgia Mountains, firefly flashes reminded me of the rare times I witnessed lightning bugs on spring nights in Manatee County, Florida. My brother and I were often sent to bed shortly after dark, so perhaps fireflies appeared more often than my childhood memories suggest, but I […]

If a tiny hawk hovers over an open grassy area in Florida between May and July, that little bird, or more accurately, falcon, is a Southeastern American Kestrel. The northern migrant species has already left for cooler climates. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation contends “recognizing the difference between the two subspecies solely by physical characteristics […]

When Juliet asked Romeo, “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark,That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear,” during a reading in my ninth grade English class, I thought I could easily picture the lark, but I had no image for the nightingale. I […]

Long before I had ever seen a print of and read a discussion about Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, I listened to and watched for real nighthawks in the 1950’s evening skies on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County, Florida. Hopper’s 1942 oil on canvas painting captured people metaphorically as nightbirds in a downtown diner […]

What we, as humans, do not know about dragonflies, which have been around for more than 300 million years, is substantial. According to an NPR report on the studies of Martin Wikelski, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University in New Jersey, “Dragonflies are long-distance fliers that travel similarly to migrating birds,…build up […]

In Florida, the Eastern Fox Squirrel and the Striped Skunk can be mistaken for each other, particularly if the squirrel is one of the dark color variations. Both species have an habitual behavior of walking through grass in an ambling fashion with their bushy tails arched up over their backs to the back of their […]

“The Village Blacksmith” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow written in 1840, the first poem of any substance I remember from Parrish Elementary School, struck me as a fairly accurate physical description of my father. He did not have a smithy, but he did often work under large oaks to avoid some of Florida’s brutal sun. He […]

Sailfin mollies can be found fresh, brackish, and coastal waters all over Florida, but most people I have pointed them out to were unaware of their existence. A minnow is a minnow to many…and if someone only sees a group of female sailfins, he or she might easily dismiss them as slightly larger than average mosquito […]

My mother must have been inspired more than a bit by Ranch Romances, Thrilling Ranch Stories, and Rodeo Romances, pulp fiction magazines that began publication in 1924 and ran through 1971. According to Chelsea Anderson, “Ranch Romances was only one of more than 180 western pulp magazines created between 1920 and 1950 , and only a small part […]

Vick Blackstone walked like a cowboy, talked like a cowboy, and dressed like a cowboy because he was the epitome, in my mind, of what a veteran cowboy should act and look like. Actors who portrayed cowboys on television like Clint Walker, Chuck Conners, James Garner, James Arness, Clint Eastwood, and Robert […]

Jimmy Buffett captured the essence of hurricane season in his 1974 song from A1A, “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season,” when he sang, “Squalls out on the gulf stream Big storm commin’ soon…” My closest experience with a hurricane occurred in 1968 when Hurricane Gladys passed the Pinellas peninsula on Friday, October 18th during my senior […]

The original Sunshine Skyway Bridge, opened in 1954, did away with the need for the Bee Line Ferry boats that transported people and cars from Pinellas County across Tampa Bay to Manatee or Sarasota County. Jerry Blizin revisited the event in an article in the St. Petersburg Times published on October 20, 2009. The extra 50 miles […]

The current edition of Rodeo News features the article, “Back When They Bucked with Pat Ommert” with her picture from a performance years ago, which, in turn, reminded me of the years spent on the Quarter Circle A ranch in Manatee County, Florida with Faye and Vic Blackstone, who are both in the Cowboy and Cowgirl Halls […]